BEYOND EXPERIMENTATION

There'll Soon Be a Former Dope Smoker in the White House. But Will
Politicians Ever Grasp the Nettle of Drug Reform?

Whoever wins the American presidential election next month, there
will be a dope smoker in the White House next year. Both Barack Obama
and Sarah Palin have admitted that, in their youth, they smoked
marijuana. British politicians are also becoming marginally franker
about their own use of the drug, although the standard term is to
"experiment" with cannabis; strangely, no-one talks about their
student days "experimenting" with beer and wine.

One might have thought that with so many politicians on both sides of
the Atlantic having "experimented" and lived to tell the tale, that
there would be a more receptive response to attempts to address the
place of cannabis in the law. This week, the respected Beckley
Foundation has published the report of its global cannabis
commission, compiled by an international team of acknowledged experts
on the issue, and its findings make intriguing reading.

The thrust of the report, presented in the House of Lords yesterday,
is that there is urgent need for a debate to move beyond the
stalemate we have now reached. As the report suggests, although
cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental
health, in terms of relative harm, it is considerably less damaging
than alcohol or tobacco. While there have only been two deaths
worldwide attributed to cannabis, alcohol and tobacco together are
responsible for an estimated 150,000 deaths per annum in the UK alone.

Yet more than half the arrests for drugs worldwide are for minor
cannabis offences and, suggests the commission, the damage done by
the criminalising these minor offenders, drawing them into the
criminal world and using the time and resources of the justice system
to do so, appears to far outweigh the medical and societal damage.

The lead author of the report, Professor Robin Room, spelled out the
potential areas for discussion and the options for regulation of the
drug. He was not advocating legalisation but merely asking for
politicians to engage with the actual research that exists. For
instance, the lowering of cannabis from a class B to a class C drug
in the UK did not have the effect of increasing its use, despite the
parroted claims that it would "send the wrong message". In fact, the
opposite happened, which makes the government's current plans to
reverse the reclassification even more baffling.

There is ample evidence that regulation and education work for drugs:
in 1950, 80% of men smoked tobacco, now the figure is around 30%,
thanks to a mixture of information, taxation and restriction. But
neither the government nor the Conservative party dare to discuss the
issue and only the Liberal Democrats and the Greens will address what
is one of the most important issues facing us. Instead, we follow the
bellicose call from across the Atlantic for a "war on drugs" as
misdirected and misinformed as the "war on terror".

The global cannabis commission report contains much that would aid
the debate. Let's hope that at least some of our politicians
"experiment" with it.